The Postman (14 page)

 … a series of faint, eerie sounds at the very edge of audibility. The half-memories they pulled forth sent a shiver
up Gordon’s back. He had not heard their like since … since long, long ago.

At the end of the dusty hallway faint light outlined a cracked door jamb. He approached, quietly.

Bloop!

Gordon touched the cold metal knob. It was free of dust. Someone was already inside.

Wah-wah …

The absent weight of his revolver—left in his guest room in supposedly safe Cottage Grove—made him feel half-naked as he turned the knob and opened the door.

Dusty tarpaulins covered stacked crates filled with odds and ends, everything from salvaged tires to tools to furniture, a hoard put aside by the villagers against the uncertain future. Around one row of boxes came the source of that faint, flickering light. There were hushed voices just ahead, whispering in urgent excitement. And that sound—

Bloop. Bloop!

Gordon crept alongside the towers of musty crates—like unsteady cliffs of ancient sediment—growing more tense as he approached the end of the row. The glow spread. It was a
cold
light, without heat.

A floorboard creaked under his foot.

Five faces turned up suddenly, cast into deep relief by the strange light. In a breathless instant Gordon saw that they were
children
, staring up at him in terrified awe—the more so because they clearly recognized him. Their eyes were wide and they did not move.

But Gordon cared about none of that, only about a little boxlike object that lay on an oval rug in the center of the small coven. He could not believe what he was seeing.

Across its bottom was a row of tiny buttons, and in the center a flat, gray screen gave off a pearly sheen.

Pink spiders emerged from flying saucers and stepped imperiously down the screen, to a crunching, marching beat. Arriving at the bottom without opposition, they bleated in triumph, then their ranks reformed and the assault began all over again.

Gordon’s throat was dry.

“Where …” he breathed.

The children stood up. One of the boys swallowed. “Sir?”

Gordon pointed. “Where in the name of all that’s holy did you get that?” He shook his head. “More important … where did you get the
batteries!
”

One of the children began to cry. “Please, sir, we didn’t know it was wrong. Timmy Smith told us it’s just a game the oldtime children used to have! We find ’em all over, only they don’t work no more.…”

“Who,” Gordon insisted, “is Timmy Smith?”

“A boy. His pa has come down from Creswell with a wagon to trade the last couple years. Timmy swapped this one for twenty old ones we found that wouldn’t work no more.”

Gordon recalled the map he had been studying in his room earlier in the evening. Creswell was just a little north of here, not far off the route he had planned to take to Eugene.

Can it be?
Hope was too hot and sudden to be a pleasure, or even recognized.

“Did Timmy Smith say where he
got
the toy?” He tried not to spook the children, but some of his urgency must have spilled over, frightening them.

A girl wailed. “He said he got it from
Cyclops!
”

Then, in a panicked flurry, the children were gone, disappeared down little alleys in the dusty storage room. Gordon was left suddenly alone, standing quite still, watching tiny invaders descend in the glow of the little gray screen.

“Crunch-crunch-crunch,” they marched.

The game
blooped
victoriously. Then began to play all over again.

The pony’s breath puffed visibly as it plodded on through the dank drizzle, led by a man in a rain-slick poncho. Its only burdens were a saddle and two thick bags, plastic-covered against the damp.

The gray Interstate glistened wetly. Deep puddles lay like small lakes in the concrete. Dirt had blown over the four-lane highway during the postwar drought years, and grass had later begun to grow as the old northwest rains returned. Much of the highway was now a ribbon of meadow, a flat notch in the forested hills overlooking a churning river.

Gordon raised his slicker tentlike to consult his map. Ahead, to his right, a large fen had formed where the south and east forks of the Willamette came together before cutting west between Eugene and Springfield. According to the old map there was a modern industrial park below. Now only a few old roofs stuck out above the mire. The neat lanes, parking lots, and lawns were a realm for water fowl, who seemed not at all discomfitted by the wet.

Back in Creswell they had told Gordon the Interstate would be impassable a little north of here. He would have to cut through Eugene itself, find an open bridge across the river, and then somehow get back onto the highway to Coburg.

The Creswellers had been a little vague on details. Few travelers had made the trip since the war.

That’s all right. Eugene has been one of my goals for months. We’ll take a look at what’s become of her
.

Briefly, though. Now the city was only a milestone along his path toward a deeper mystery, waiting farther to the north.

The elements had not yet defeated the Interstate. It might be grassy and puddled, but the only fallen bridges he had passed still bore obvious signs of violence. When man built well, it seemed, only time or man himself could bring his things down.
And they did build well
, Gordon thought. Maybe future generations of Americans, ambling through the forests eating each other, would think these works the creations of gods.

He shook his head.
The rain, it’s got me in a fey mood
.

Soon he came upon a large sign, half buried in a puddle. Gordon kicked away debris and knelt to examine the rusting plate—like a tracker reading a cold trail in a forest path.

“Thirtieth Avenue,” he read aloud.

A broad road cut into the hills to the west, away from the Interstate. According to the map, downtown Eugene was just over the forested rise that way.

He got up and patted his pack animal. “Come on, Dobbin. Swish your tail and signal for a right turn. It’s off the freeway and down surface streets from here.” The horse puffed stoically as Gordon gave the reins a gentle tug and led it down the off-ramp, then under the overpass and on up the slope to the west.

From the top of the hill a gently falling mist seemed somehow to soften the ruined town’s disfigurement. Rains had long since washed away the fire stains. Slow beards of climbing greenery, sprouting from cracks in the pavement, covered many of the buildings, hiding their wounds.

Folk in Creswell had warned him what to expect. Still, it was never easy coming into a dead city. Gordon descended to the ghostly streets, strewn with broken glass. The rain-wet pavement sparkled with another era’s shattered panes.

In the lower parts of town, alders grew in the streets, in dirt laid down when a river of mud slammed into the city
from the broken Fall Creek and Lookout Point dams. The collapse of those reservoirs had wiped out Route 58 west of Oakridge, forcing Gordon to make his long detour south and west through Curtin, Cottage Grove, and Creswell before finally swinging north again.

The devastation was pretty bad.
And yet
, Gordon thought,
they held on, here. From all accounts, they almost made it
.

Back in Creswell, between all the meetings and celebrations—the election of the new postmaster and excited plans to extend the new mail delivery network east and west—the citizens had regaled Gordon with stories of the valiant struggle of Eugene. They told how the city had struggled to hold out for four long years after war and epidemic had isolated it from the outer world. In a strange alliance of the university community and red-neck country farmers, somehow the city-state had overcome all threats … until at last the bandit gangs finished her off by blasting the upland reservoirs all at once, cutting off both power and unpolluted water.

The tale was already legendary, almost like the fall of Troy. And yet the storytellers hadn’t sounded forlorn in telling it. It was more as if they now looked upon the disaster as a temporary setback, to be overcome within their own lifetimes.

For Creswell had been in a tizzy of optimism even before Gordon’s arrival. His tale of a “Restored United States” was the town’s
second
dose of good news in less than three months.

Last winter
another
visitor had arrived—this one from the north, a grinning man in a white-and-black robe—who passed out startling gifts for the children and then departed, speaking the magical name
Cyclops
.

Cyclops
, the stranger had said.

Cyclops would make things right again. Cyclops would bring comfort and progress back into the world, redeeming everybody from drudgery and lingering hopelessness, the legacy of the Doomwar.

All the people had to do was collect their old machinery, particularly electronics. Cyclops would take their donations of useless, ruined equipment, plus perhaps a little surplus food to maintain its volunteer servants. In return, Cyclops would give the Creswellans things that
worked
.

The toys were only tokens of what was to come. Someday there would be real miracles.

Gordon had been unable to get anything coherent from the people of Creswell. They were too deliriously happy to be completely logical. Half of them assumed his “Restored United States” was
behind
Cyclops, and half thought it was the other way around. It hardly occurred to anybody that the two wonders could be unconnected—two spreading legends encountering one another in the wilderness.

Gordon didn’t dare disabuse them, or ask too many questions. He had left as quickly as he could—loaded down with more letters than ever—determined to follow the tale to its source.

It was about noon as he turned north on University Street. The gentle rain was no bother. He could explore Eugene for a while and still make it by nightfall to Coburg, where a settlement of gleaners supposedly lived. Somewhere north of there lay the territory from which the followers of Cyclops were spreading word of their strange redemption.

As he walked quietly past the gutted buildings, Gordon wondered if he should even try to pull his “postman” hoax in the north. He remembered the little spiders and saucers, flashing in the darkness, and found it hard not to hope.

Perhaps he could give up the scam and find something real to believe in at last. Perhaps someone, at last, was leading a fight against the dark age.

It was too sweet a glimmer to let go of, but too delicate to hold tightly.

The shattered storefronts of the deserted town gave way at last to Eighteenth Avenue and the University of Oregon campus, the broad athletic field now overgrown with
aspen and alder saplings, some more than twenty feet high. There, near the old gymnasium, Gordon slowed down, then stopped abruptly and held the pony still.

The animal snorted and pawed the ground as Gordon listened, and then was sure.

Somewhere, perhaps not too far away, somebody was screaming.

The faint crying crescendoed then fell away. It was a woman’s voice, soaked with pain and deadly fear. Gordon pushed back the cover of his holster and drew his revolver. Had it come from the north? The east?

He pushed into a semijungle between the university buildings, hurriedly seeking a place to go to ground. He had had an easy time of it since leaving Oakridge months ago, too easy. Obviously he had acquired bad habits. It was a miracle no one had heard
him
, traipsing down these deserted streets as if he owned them.

He led the pony through a gaping door in the side of a slate-sided gymnasium, and tethered the animal behind a fold-down stand of bleachers. Gordon dropped a pile of oats near the animal, but left the saddle in place and cinched.

Now
what? Do we wait it out? Or do we check it out?

Gordon unwrapped his bow and quiver and set the string. In the rain they were probably more reliable, and certainly quieter than his carbine or revolver.

He stuffed one of the bulging mail sacks into a ventilation shaft, well out of sight. As he was searching for a place to hide the other, he suddenly realized what he was doing.

He grinned ironically at his momentary foolishness and left the second bag lying on the floor as he set off to find the trouble.

The sounds came from a brick building just ahead, one whose long bank of glass windows still gleamed. Apparently looters hadn’t even thought the place worth bothering with.

Now Gordon could hear faint, muttered voices, the soft nickering of horses, and the creaking of tack.

Seeing no watchers at the roofs or windows, he dashed
across the overgrown lawn and up a broad flight of concrete steps, flattening against a doorway around the corner of the building. He breathed open-mouthed for silence.

The door bore an ancient, rusted padlock and an engraved plastic sign.

The voices came from just within … though too muffled to make out anything distinct. An outside stairway led up to several floors overhead. He stepped back and saw that a door lay ajar three flights up.

Gordon knew he was being a fool once again. Now that he had the trouble located, he really should go collect his pony and get the hell out of there, as quickly as possible.

The voices within grew angry. Through the crack in the door he heard a blow being struck. A woman’s cry of pain was followed by coarse male laughter.

Sighing softly at the flaw in his character that kept him there—instead of running away as anyone with any brains would do—Gordon started climbing the concrete stair, careful not to make a sound.

Rot and mold covered an area just within the half-open doorway. But beyond that the fourth floor of the student center looked untouched. Miraculously, none of the glass panes in the great skylight had been smashed, though the copper frame wore a patina of verdigris. Under the atrium’s pale glow a carpeted ramp spiraled downward, connecting each floor.